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“Fools for Christ's Sake”
Categories: Meditations
I admit to being reassured by the apostle Paul’s use of sarcasm. As any student of Scripture knows, rather than being sweetly earnest all the time, Paul had a keen sense of irony, and he didn’t hesitate to deploy it for rhetorical effect. One of the most sarcastic passages in Paul’s writing appears in 1 Corinthians 4:8-13. Here, he compares the presumed spiritual accomplishments of the Corinthians to his own suffering for Christ’s sake. Particularly, in v. 10, he observes, “We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong, You are held in honor, but we in disrepute.”
The idea of being a fool for Christ is well worth unpacking. Of course, Paul isn’t speaking in spiritual terms here. He’s offering a world’s-eye-view, or, more precisely, a weak-Christian’s-eye-view, of the difference between him and the Corinthians. They had apparently managed to straddle the gap between Christ and the world, belonging to the former while remaining respectable in the eyes of the latter.
Paul, on the other hand, did all sorts of “foolish” things. He didn’t ask churches for money. He was loud about his faith even when he knew it would get him in trouble. He got kicked out of synagogues. He made such a nuisance of himself for Christ that he was constantly getting entangled in legal trouble or even run out of town. Paul was at war with the world, not on good terms with it, and the conflict constantly made his life more difficult. However, in God’s eyes, Paul, not the Corinthians, was on the right track.
Today, we must grapple with the possibility that unless we are willing to be fools for Christ’s sake, we might not be anythings for Christ’s sake. This is hard. Like the Corinthians, we want to be respectable, and it’s easy for Christians to fall into a respectable Chamber-of-Commerce kind of religion. We can be good solid citizens who go to church on Sunday, never do anything crazy, and leave everybody else alone.
The problem is, though, that Chamber-of-Commerce religion isn’t Christlike. It’s Christ-lite. Jesus was righteous, not respectable. The respectable elements of His society generally hated Him. He was loud. He caused too much trouble. He didn’t appreciate them the way they felt they should be appreciated. He demanded that people make dramatic changes in their lives for God’s sake. Ultimately, He picked too many fights with the wrong people and got nailed to a cross for it. “What a fool,” we can imagine them saying, shaking their heads sadly.
We need to be the same kind of fool. We need to be loud about Jesus and not shut up, even when others start thinking less of us for it. We need to be willing to do the right thing, even if society thinks we’re nuts for doing it. In short, we need to prove that this world is not our home by doing the things that the wise citizens of this world don’t do. Otherwise, we cannot foreclose the possibility that rather than using Jesus’ playbook, we’re merely using the playbook of the worldly wise.
